Upstream 2017 review: Beta-testing the Northwest's next new music festival

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"This a well-intended festival and hopefully it's here to stay," Macklemore said at the WaMu Theater on Friday as the hip-hop star's keynote interview came to a close.

That's probably the best way to describe the Upstream Music Fest + Summit, Seattle's entry into the shifting landscape of new music festivals and industry conferences.

Most festivals cover "new music," but Upstream, which ran Thursday through Saturday on the dime of Microsoft billionaire/arts patron Paul Allen and his company Vulcan, is not Coachella or Bonnaroo, outdoor fests that draw tens of thousands for big names, fashion looks and Snapchat storytelling, and campsite partying. Instead, it mirrored the mission of Austin's SXSW: a city takeover to showcase emerging artists for curious fans and industry notables alike, with a daytime conference to share wisdom and networking opportunities. SXSW"s lost some of that focus to overwhelming crowds and corporate grotesqueries: Upstream felt more like Boise's breathable, low-key Treefort, and had a local emphasis to match.

It's the kind of event that's needed more than ever. Living costs from Seattle all the way down the coast are blasting upward like a North Korean missile test, draining artists who could once count on bohemian rents and blue-collar jobs to make room for their music. Upstream won't solve that, but for three days, it carved out space for musicians and cut them checks, too. The fest, which counted a sponsor in Seattle's travel bureau, took over not just Pioneer Square neighborhood venues but restaurants, bars, patios, and exposed-brick event spaces advertising wedding receptions: it encouraged discovering the city itself with music as a constant companion. The lessons--that musicians are inseparable from, even responsible for, the cultural life of cities; hosting safe, accessible concerts isn't hard--should earn the notice of city officials across the country who often see nightlife as a weed, not a crop to cultivate.

That's lofty stuff, but Upstream aimed high. Without hand-counting the lineup's demographic participants, the Upstream shows I saw were diverse on race, gender, sexuality and genre: on Thursday night alone, I saw Dream Journal, a sample-triggering electronic producer; LoveCityLove, a swaggering, multicultural soul band; Andrew Joslyn and his transcendent Passenger Ensemble, a classical group with a rock rhythm section and pop-length songs; and the roaring punk and deadpan banter of rising Seattle trio Dude York. Each of these shows and a dozen more over the rest of the weekend were busy, if not packed out: one artist I spoke with was irked at the fire marshals' 49-person limit at his venue, but from the audience, both the elbow room and the easy entry from venue to venue were welcome.

The conference, dubbed a summit, was split between larger talks (Macklemore, Quincy Jones, Ron Jones and Portland's own Portia Sabin) and smaller panels, offered inspiration and ideas an aspirational podcast might call "actionable": in other words, industry advice from people who've made it, or are trying to stay made. One session, "Bigger Than You - Scene-building and Collaborative Marketing," with Edelman's Megan Tweed, Tender Loving Empire's Jared Mees and Treefort and Duck Club's Eric Gilbert and Megan Stoll, was rich with small-scale success stories and useful examples.

First-year fests are often logistical nightmares. I'll never forget walking into the opening afternoon of Arthur Magazine's wonderful, one-time Arthurfest before organizers bothered to set up a ticket line. But I didn't witness any problems like that at Upstream, where shows covered the fest bases of sounding good and starting roughly on time. The worst part of the weekend was the Seattle rain, which wavered between an irritating drizzle and an outright downpour that threatened to make Dinosaur Jr's Saturday set on the outdoor main stage a slog. (In a festival miracle, it paused before they started.) If there were other concerns, they were hard to notice, and social media chatter seemed focused on the music.

The fest's more paranoid attendees may have noticed that on the same weekend a sprawling cyber-attack exploited Windows computers across the world, Allen's festival surveilled its attendees: with wristbands connected to a personal ID and scanned at each venue; and always-on location tracking built into the fest's app itself, which I noticed only when my phone warned me with a notification the morning after the festival. How or if the fest will use the venue information and its massive data pile is unclear: the app states its tracking is "anonymized" and used for crowd purposes.

In a fest like this, spread across some two dozen venues, having the tracked choose-your-own-adventure decisions of every attendee would be tremendously useful data for, say, planning next year, but it also raises issues with privacy and consent. (Presumably some of this is covered in those pesky terms and conditions none of us read.) And in a music industry increasingly ruled by streaming plays and social media stats, it hinted at a festival future where metrics, not music, make the final decisions on who plays where.

In 2017, though, Upstream was curated by humans, and superbly so. Looking forward, Upstream may have to make a choice: if it wants to bring in bigger names and the crowds that come with them, or if it can somehow afford to stay intimate and relevant for a self-selecting audience, an event for the sliver of industry members and music geeks excited to take a chance on someone else's "walkable mixtape," as the fest called itself. Other events have faced that fork in the road: Portland's MusicfestNW, which grew out of the SXSW-tied NXNW, traded its urban marathon for a mini-Coachella at Waterfront Park and a partnership with Pabst Brewing.

For newer artists, fests like that are an arrival. SXSW, and New York's recently defunct CMJ, are rites of passage. On one rainy weekend, Upstream showed it has what it takes to join them.